Sanders voices outrage in Flint

FLINT, Mich. — The federal government must recognize this city’s water contamination crisis as an “emergency situation” since local government doesn’t have the resources to help sufficiently, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders told enraged residents during a wide-ranging and emotional campaign stop on Thursday.

“If we are looking at children being poisoned,” he said, “if that is not an emergency, I just don’t know what an emergency is."

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“It sounds to me like people would like to see a Department of Justice investigation,” he later added — taking in resident complaints about the lack of information on how the current crisis arose, and why it hasn’t been fixed sooner — before again asking residents what they wanted out of the government.

Visiting the city that’s been ravaged by water poisoning for the first time as a candidate, the Vermont senator stood on stage, asking a series of questions and aiming to get answers about the situation on the ground for more than an hour while he grew visibly more agitated and the crowd grew increasingly upset about the lack of a satisfactory reaction to the contamination.

The situation in Flint is “one of the most serious public health crises in the modern history of this country,” Sanders told the crowd at the Woodside Church here, which was overwhelmingly white despite the city’s majority black population.

“If there is any silver lining out of this tragedy, it is my hope that the American people will look at Flint and say, ‘never again,’" he said in a room with cases of water bottles stacked along one wall and lead testing swabs and information sheets being distributed outside, flanked by four expert and activist panelists.

“While Flint may be the canary in the coal mine, there are a lot of other canaries all around the country. The truth is our infrastructure is collapsing."

In January, President Barack Obama declared a federal emergency here.

Sanders did not come armed with any specific policy proposals, and he spent most of the time asking for information from the audience. Much of Sanders’ time on stage was taken up by Flint and local residents telling him about the water poisoning. At one point, when an audience member asked him what he would do as president to help, he demurred and asked what the locals wanted from him.

Answers ranged from immediately replacing the city’s pipes to overhauling its software system to arresting the governor.

While Thursday’s trip — sandwiched between campaign swings through the Cleveland suburbs and Chicago — was Sanders’ inaugural stop in Flint, he has been increasing the city’s presence in his stump speech in recent weeks, primarily as an example of failing urban infrastructure.

On Thursday, hands shot up throughout the audience from start to finish, as locals shared stories about how they had been affected and how the city — one of the country’s poorest — had struggled for help and attention.

“What I’ve been hearing about these filters is sometimes they don’t filter out what’s in the water. They don’t even work. It’s to pacify us,” said one third-year student at the University of Michigan at Flint who stood up to complain about the filters being distributed in town. “If this were happening in Lansing or a richer city, it would have been taken care of years ago."

And when Sanders asked what it would mean for someone to take a shower in town, another audience member immediately yelled back, “You’re rolling the dice and hoping you don’t get poisoned!"

When the underdog candidate made a campaign trip to Michigan last week, Democrats across the country were surprised he didn’t stop in Flint when he was in the state. While Sanders has a campaign office here and Hillary Clinton recently opened one, as well, the senator has had a lower profile in responding to the crisis here.

For Sanders, there was also a clear political element to the trip. Michigan — with a large population of college students — is one of his biggest target states for the month of March despite support from much of the state’s Democratic leadership.

Michigan's large population of African-American and minority voters also plays to Clinton’s advantage given her lead among those demographic groups nationwide, but Sanders is eager to cut into that to prove his viability.

The composition of the audience for the Flint forum was illustrative of his political problem: while he can draw large crowds, he has struggled to win over black voters in significant numbers, raising serious questions about his viability in a number of states that will vote in March.

Clinton is expected to win South Carolina easily, so Sanders’ camp figured his time was better spent touching a handful of those strategically important March-voting states near the end of the week. After leaving Columbia on Wednesday morning he held rallies in Missouri (near the border with Kansas) and Oklahoma, before other scheduled events in Ohio, Illinois, and Minnesota on Thursday and Friday.

But while his other events were predominantly large, thundering rallies, he spent most of the time in Flint listening — a departure from his standard stump speech.

“How much are people paying a month for poisoned water?,” he asked at one point, looking baffled to hear responses of over $200. “Issue number one — general agreement — people are paying huge amounts. Four times as much as I am paying in Burlington” for poisoned water, he said.

The early portion of his event was peppered with such questions, giving residents a chance to speak out, but also highlighting that this was Sanders’ first visit. He asked if there was pending local legislation to reduce water bills, for example, and wanted to know if the water, today, “is drinkable in the average person’s home?"

“No!” came shouts from across the church.

Clinton herself left the New Hampshire campaign trail two days before that state’s Feb. 9 primary to stop in Flint, and her team is now using footage from that trip as an ad in Michigan — which has a primary in March. Sanders’ trip was announced less than two hours after the Clinton team told reporters her ad was on the air.

The former secretary of state sent two top aides into the city soon after the local saga broke into national prominence, and her staffers have since returned. Clinton’s gotten the backing of the city’s mayor and a group of its community and religious leaders since she has been forceful in calling the crisis a racial issue, noting that a similar situation would not have occurred in a predominantly white suburb of Detroit. Her campaign also raised money for the Community Foundation of Greater Flint with a fundraising email similar to the type usually reserved for political cash.

Still, it is Sanders who has gone further in demanding an immediate political response, calling on Republican Gov. Rick Snyder to resign over his handling of the water contamination.

“The dereliction of duty to this community has been so extraordinary that I think in good conscience he should resign,” Sanders said in the church, frequently reminding the crowd that he himself is a former mayor and that a top priority should be spreading information in a more transparent manner.

But on Thursday, he also aimed to strike a more personal tone.

“We have seven beautiful grandchildren and to hear what is happening to the children of this community is so horrific, it is so painful, it is almost hard to discuss,” he said.